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Improv Open ARM Board Failure Leads To A Ton Of In-Fighting

05-24-2014, 03:50 PM

Phoronix: Improv Open ARM Board Failure Leads To A Ton Of In-Fighting

Earlier this month I wrote about it looking like the Mer-powered Improv ARM board will not ship and now it's even more clear about the libre hardware project's dire situation with just open fights going on between the project and its former hardware supplier...

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Back when Vivaldi was announced, I thought it was a great step in the right direction for linux proper to take the field from Android, because I knew that if one group could do it it would be the KDE community. Well... KDE didn't fail, they got up and ported a whole bunch of software to have an additional touch interface, big names like Calligra, Kontact, and Marble as well as smaller software that would have been necessary to the success of Vivaldi. Problem is Make Play Live didn't follow through on it's part and completely fumbled not only the release of it's tablet but the Improv development board as well to the point where it's had a complete failure to launch. As much as I'm proud of the KDE community for all the work they put forward I am severely disappointed by MPL, and hope that all that hard work that KDE did will not just go to waste, and that some other company will pick up plasma active and vindicate the effort.

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The simple answer is to not do bad business which is what they did. If you doubt you can get the orders just go to a low volume manufacturer in the USA at least for the initial run.

The Floppy EMU board is a prime example of a moderatly complex board made in the USA. The main thing lacking is BGA and I imaigne just about any fab worth its salt could reflow those. I would not be surprised if they could make the boards Rhombus Tech is designing... http://www.bigmessowires.com/2014/05...m-the-factory/

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It's all sad, I would have liked to see EOMA-68 succeed. It's a great concept.

As I understand it, it's the Improv board that failed, not EOMA-68 itself. Or to phrase it differently, MakePlayLive messed up, not RhombusTech.
In software, it doesn't matter how many people are using your product; it costs the same to release it to one person as it does to 1000. This isn't the case with hardware; economies of scale matter. The problem with open hardware is that the promise of openness by itself is insufficient to create the demand needed for high end specs, which further undermines the demand. Look at the Neo900 - that's probably one of the more justified open hardware projects (plenty of people, myself included, still use a N900), but the best they could do was a 1 GHz CPU with a 800x480 screen.

The only way open hardware can work is in a kickstarter-type setup, where you get all the orders before hand, and even then there's no guarantee of success. If there are less than 1000 orders, it's not going to be viable, so it's best if it is killed off early on. The alternative is things just drag out, and people become completely pissed off. Anyone else remember Always Innovating?

I think the best hope for anything like this is Project Ara - the SoC will probably be proprietary, but at least we can design open screens, keyboards etc. to use with it.

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Oh I know, I've been following arm-netbook for a few years now. It's that the failure of the Improv put the whole EOMA back for maybe a year, perhaps more. If they had made it and sold some thousands, money would have also flowed to other EOMA initiatives, bringing the whole ahead.